Four more Cedars!

Another gardening weekend. Not as nice as last Saturday, but we decided to plant 4 more cedars on the other side of the yard where we are right next to the neighbour's deck.

Our house sits higher than the neighbours' but their 2nd floor deck is the same level as our back yard. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, for a little privacy, we decided to plant just 4 trees (didn't want to cover it entirely and be unfriendly...). See the yellow arrows in the picture below.

We also straightened our Tamarack tree. Due to the strong winds during all the storms we had recently, we noticed the tree was leaning back. We tied a rope around the tree and nailed some tent pegs into the ground to keep it straight. Not sure what else to do. Hope it will grow back straight up!

Update for the wine lovers. Our grape vines have roots now! Yay! They will be transferred to a pot and will be kept in the warm house until Spring finally comes.

★We decided to post today's blog early to participate the Earth House from 8:30pm. Hope you are all turning off the lights in the house to save energy!★

Happy Birthday Amy

We caught Snoop trying to sneak out to wish Amy a Happy Birthday!

Amy, I tried... :(  Happy Birthday anyway.

Crazy Cake

We have been getting mixed weather here, sunny and warm one day, and next day is cold wind and rain. Our new 21 trees are doing fine so far. We think they are a few inches taller already... or maybe we are just hoping too much!

I had a craving for a chocolate cake. This has been my usual "go to" chocolate cake since my mother-in-law told me about it a few years ago. Good things about this cake is low fat, easy to bake and Vegan (for you Amy!). We had this with plain yogourt & maple syrup and fresh strawberry sauce. Yum :)  I always notice sweets with chocolate (i.e. cakes or cookies) taste better next day. I once baked this for my friend's birthday (doubled the recipe), sliced the cake in half, added Nutella in between and finished with raspberry sauce & vanilla ice cream. That was great too!

Crazy Cake Recipe: (from Prevention Magazine)

Ingredients:
1.5C   Flour
1/2C   Brown Sugar
3tbsp  Coco Powder
1tsp    Baking soda
1/2tsp salt
3tbsp  vegetable oil
1tbsp  white vinegar
1tsp    vanilla extract
1C      cold water

1) Preheat oven to 350F.
2) Sift the first 5 ingredients together. Make a well in the mixture, and add oil, vinegar and water. Mix thoroughly with a fork to moisten all the dry ingredients.
3) Pour it into 8x8 baking dish. Bake for 30 min or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.

Oh, by the way, Snoop really needs a hair cut!

Cedar Hedge Project - Day 2

Done! 21 cedar trees are in. 
We just need some Advil, a few glasses of wine and good night sleep.

Done, done and done!

Some of the rocks we found when we dug the trench for the hedge.

Cedar Hedge Project Day 1

Beautiful Saturday. Perfect day for gardening!

Although my husband had to do more field work after the overnight trip and I had a choir lesson in the afternoon, we managed to start the cedar hedge project.

Today's big task was to remove the gravel and grass and start to dig the trench for the hedges. It was a hard job.... Around 4 in the afternoon, we started digging. There were so many rocks including some huge ones and we realized it will take longer than we thought to complete this project... to be continued...

Snoop, you are so NOT helpful! Snoozing in the sun...

End of Day 1...lots more to do...

Flavour of Hawaii?

I was invited to visit my Japanese friend's place for dinner last night as my husband was away for an overnight trip to North West Coast of Vancouver Island. She said she will have "Nabe" for dinner. It's a Japanese hot pot which has a mixture of meat, seafood, vegetables and noodles cooked in the broth. I decided to bring some Salad rolls that have Miso flavoured meat and assorted vegetables wrapped in rice paper and served with spicy peanut sauce to dip.

When I opened the pantry, I saw a blue tin sitting in the very back of the cabinet. It was my father's in law's SPAM...! 

Long story short, we gave him a tin of SPAM in his Christmas stocking for a joke when he, Mrs. and my sister-in-law were here for the Christmas. He 'unfortunately' had to leave the SPAM behind as they 'worried about the weight of Christmas luggage' back home.

What to do with this... I searched on the internet and found, "Ah, flavours of Hawaii!" It's called SPAM Musubi, and surprisingly there is a Wikipedia page for this, click HERE. When we were in Hawaii five years ago, we saw this in every convenience store and gift shop. It's a combination of Teriyaki flavoured SPAM with rice wrapped in Nori, seaweed, a very Japanese dish!

I made these for a joke and bought them over to my friend's place and... They liked the SPAM Musubi, specially their teen aged high school boy!

   

Turkey leftovers

The turkey dinner was on Saturday night. Since then we have been trying to finish a 14lbs bird with only two people. We thought we would share some with our spoiled son, Snoop, but his belly didn't like the idea. Poor guy...

Left overs became a huge pot of Turkey Soup and we froze two containers of it, of course there were some hot turkey sandwiches and some cold turkey sandwiches to take to work... 

The last portion of turkey leftovers became an easy turkey pot pie last night. After the Birthday turkey dinner and lunch, then another dinner and lunch we had it again, I think we are turkeyed out for a while!

Cedar Trees

A nice warm Sunday. Today, we went to visit some garden centres in town and discussed what kind of projects we need to do in the back & front yard. There is a list of things we want to do including building vegetable boxes, planting hedges, building a retaining wall in front of the entrance, planting fruit trees, weeding, mowing the lawn, re-doing the back yard gate etc....

Today, we started the hedges project. First things first. We need to get shrubs, not 7 or 8, but 23! We borrowed a friend's truck and went to the local store where they have the 7 ft cedar trees on sale for $15/each! It took us a while to load them in the truck as they are really heavy. We managed to put all 23 in the back of the truck and drove very slow home.

We will need to dig 23 big holes along the fence, so it will probably take a while to show the finished product...

 

Happy Birthday

March 16 was my husband's birthday.  On the actual day we were both busy, so we decided to do a nice meal at home on the weekend.

There was a 14lbs turkey sitting in the deep freeze since Christmas and we decided to cook that big bird! Didn't we eat Turkey on Christmas? Yes, we did have an 18lbs turkey with my in-laws, sister in-law and us.... I bought the 14 lbs turkey first, but didn't think it was big enough, so I bought another one ... Silly me... Anyway, everyone enjoyed the biggest bird at Christmas, and we ended up with the other turkey, so we are all happy :)

Forgot to take a picture of the birthday dinner as we were too busy eating, so I thought I should share the shocking moment of Snoop's encounter with the Big Bird at Christmas. My dog is 18 lbs too!

Attic DIY

It was another stormy night... Really stormy!  It kept us awake plus it took more shingles from our roof... The roofers showed up in the afternoon again to do more patch jobs ... sure hope this will be good enough for a while... They warned us that there might be another storm coming next week, so we asked them to seal the shingles well to prevent them from lifting again.

While the roofers were here, I asked them to change the vent on the roof for the bathroom as it was making a rattling noise. They replaced it but told me we need to go in the attic to tape the vent and the pipe as the pipe is not long enough.

...The Attic... dark, tight space where no one wants to go... I know it is a tight space so I need to do the job.

I opened the entrance to the attic and climbed up with a head light. Should have had a mask too, but it was too late... It was not comfortable, but see, I can do it too? 

This pic was brightened, so it seems light, but it was pitch dark!

Underwater Dogs

The day after the big storm was a sunny day. We had a roofer on our roof patching up the exposed areas. Although we might have to re-do the whole roof, we needed those quick fixes as today was another stormy day. Snow, hail, rain and strong wind. It was not as strong as the other day, but it was strong enough to take another shingle off our roof... The roofer is due to be back sometime this week, so we will see.

Now something funny to make you smile :)

Check out this website, Little Friends Photo, for underwater dogs like this one below! You will find more pics in the gallery.

My husband told me about this photographer, Seth Casteel, who lives in the States and takes underwater dog pictures. All the dogs look so intense and funny!

Snoop? He is defiantly NOT an underwater dog... Amy, your dogs should be good candidates for underwater dogs?

Big Storm!

Just wanted to let you know that we survived the latest big storm.

Wind gusts up to 130km/hr took down trees and power lines all over town...
It also took part of our roof ... again... but a lot more damage this time with shingles flying all over the yard and into the dog park next door.  We called the insurance company, but they are busy with other houses which have bigger problems than us. Hopefully someone can come and check out our roof in a few days.

We lost power at 5am and it just came back after 8:00 this evening. But somehow we managed to eat well :)

Anyway, just wanted to write a quick note saying we are fine.

The usual walking path after the storm...

Hydro cables are down due to many fallen trees all over town

3/11

It's still March 10th here in Canada, but it's one day ahead in Japan. March 11th is the one year anniversary of the Earthquake & Tsunami that hit northeast coastline of Japan.

Our time tonight at 9:46pm in BC = 2:46pm in Japan is when the earthquake happened. According to the news, the number of people who are still evacuated from their homes is 340,000 and 110,000 of them are living in the temporary housing in seven different prefectures. The death toll is 16,000 and 3,155 people are still missing...

Our life has been the same as usual since the earthquake in Japan. Even Japanese people who are living far away from the affected area still have their normal life style. As the one year anniversary approaches, we should remember this event again and re-think of our life style and how fortunate we are to be with our loved ones.

This is the slide-show I created for a fund raising event we organized in our town after the quake last year.

Please observe a moment of silence for those people in Japan who were affected by the quake.

Thai Dinner Helper

We love Thai food and we often went out to different Thai restaurants in Vancouver. When we moved here to this small town, we were a little disappointed about how few restaurants choices there are. I like to cook so I enjoy trying out many different recipes, but Thai food is a hard one to spice right.

So, I found this little dinner helper! A can of "Aroy-D Curry sauce". If you have never tried this, you must. It's really good. Tastes like a real Thai restaurant curry. They have this green curry or red curry at the store near our place. We have only found this at the London Drugs, but I'm sure you will find them easier in bigger cities. You just need to cook protein, meat or tofu, add the sauce and simmer...(we always add more veggies...)         

Voila - Authentic Thai Green Curry Dinner!  Enjoy :)

 

Salmon Capital of the World

My town on Vancouver Island is also known as the "Salmon Capital of the World". In the summer time, I see many people go down to the river in their shorts and sandals with fishing gear. They stand in the river and fish... and catch salmon, that easy! Young kids stand by their parents with a stick on their hands...and wait for the fish to come on the shore... and then smack, smack, smack them with a stick! Tough kids!

We have some fisherman friends and they sometime share their catch with us. We are so lucky to know them! One of our friends works as a fishing guide. When he returns from the fishing trips, not everyone takes their catch, so he keeps the salmon. We have several cans of salmon sitting in the pantry, so I decided to use them for dinner tonight, making fish cakes.

We also have about 3 dozen freshly canned cans of salmon from another friend. Didn't know but found out we have to wait at least one year before we eat these as the bones are still hard. So, anyone who wants a nice salmon sandwich has to wait for a while.

DIY - Garage

A Sunny beautiful day! A bit cold, but it was warm enough to be outside once your are in the sun. Snoop enjoyed laying in the sun while we worked on the garage.

This is another DIY project we wanted to do when we moved into this house - insulate the garage. Our garage was not finished, so we found it was really cold during the winter. One reason to insulate the garage is to save on the energy costs of heating up the house.... Also it's just more comfortable to have a nice warm garage.  As we are first time house owners, we looked up some youtube videos about how to insulate the walls. We both prepared to use fiberglass insulation by covering our bodies with a hat, glasses, mask, gloves and etc. It took us a while to get used to working with the foamy awkward material, but we were able to finish the walls.

Now the next step is to borrow a truck and get the dry wall boards to seal them up. We already can feel the garage is a bit warmer and quieter than before. So many projects to do as the weather getting better. After the garage, we need to start building vegetable garden boxes in the back yard. That will be another DIY story to come...

 

Also something to share with you  today... See this below? It's one of the grape vines we planted about a month ago. I tried to put some in a pot with soil and others in water. This guy was in the water and two buds are coming out! I was hoping to see roots growing, but I only see buds so far. It's still too cold out to transfer this plant, so this will stay inside for a while yet :)

 

White Dog

Snoop had lots of fun at the dog park today... Who decided to get a white dog....?

Red Apron

This is the dinner menu for this evening...

Marinated & Grilled Flank Steak with Caramelized Onions, Red Peppers & Garlic Aioli
Creamy Whole Wheat Macaroni & Cheese
Winter Salad with Apples, Carrots & Spiced Pecans
'True Loaf'Square Buns 
and for dessert...
Black Forest Cake

...at my in-law's in Ottawa! Fancy, eh?

I found a "sophisticated comfort food" catering service in Ottawa called Red Apron early last year. They deliver fancy meals like the above three days a week Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Their mission is to use ingredients from local farmers and producers in Ontario and Quebec. Their suppliers produce delicious food in ecologically friendly ways to ensure the tastiest baked goods, highest-grade regional meats, and freshest pesticide-free produce, prepared with care.

This is not just another food delivery service. This is really a sophisticated version of delivery meals! My husband and I have been using their service several times now for our in-law's special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries. They said that they loved all the meals they tried so far! Best part is they just wait for the dinner to arrive and eat & drink at their own comfortable dining room - don't need to worry about how many glasses of wines they had before driving back home. Dad, I heard you have three nice bottles of wine at home! How many are you planning to open tonight?

This dinner tonight was one of the Christmas gifts to my in-laws. They had been checking the menu on-line and tonight's menu was good enough to order!

I hope you guys enjoyed the dinner! Merry Christmas!

*Received a message from M&D saying it was a great Christmas gift! Another success!

Rideau Canal Skateway & Parliament Building: Pic from Tourism Ottawa